


Thirty

by headasexual



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Disguise, Gen, Hospitals, Medicine, Raphael Santiago Has Feelings, Raphael practicing medicine without a license, Raphael-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:00:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26270788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/headasexual/pseuds/headasexual
Summary: Raphael sneaks into the hospital to visit his baby sister when she's sick. And then he keeps going.
Relationships: Raphael Santiago & Rosa Santiago
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11
Collections: September Server Scavenger Hunt 2020





	Thirty

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this image prompt from the Hunter's Moon discord: https://www.instagram.com/p/CEmExgwA5Rp/?igshid=12911n4rzkf3g
> 
> Written in honor of Raphael's birthday as part of the HM September 2020 Scavenger Hunt.

Working the job as the night janitor at St. Vincent’s Hospital had been easy enough. After all, you don’t really need to have the job to do it. No one ever really pays attention to maintenance workers. As long as you’re wearing the right uniform and look like you know what you’re doing, people will just assume that you belong. 

It had started with his sister. When Rose had gotten sick, he was beside himself. She was his last living relative, and it absolutely killed him that visiting hours were strictly 10am to 6pm. Square in the middle of the day when the sun was still at its brightest. So he decided to improvise. 

The getup had been easy to get. A phone order to one of those stores that sells uniforms had gotten him the right color and style for the hospital. The badge had also been simple enough to get a hold of. All he had to do was use an  _ encanto _ one of the male nurses that looked enough like him after he got off duty to give him his badge, and just like that he had an all-access pass inside.

He had just wandered around, mopping and looking around from floor to floor until he finally found her room. He had gingerly shut the door behind him to make sure that no one saw him with her. Thankfully she was sound asleep, but he could hear the rasp in her breathing. He looked over her. She liked to keep her hair dyed dark, but it had been a while since she had been able to go to the salon and he could see the beginnings of those grey roots. Her skin had long ago lost the smoothness of youth, but she was still so young and beautiful to him. He leaned over her and pressed a small kiss to her forehead. He caught a whiff of something, something he didn’t like. Something was wrong. She didn’t smell right, but he couldn’t confirm his suspicion by smell alone. He had to know. He swallowed down the guilt he felt as he took her soft wrinkled hand in his and took a delicate bite into the tip of her finger, just enough to taste her blood. He felt a wave of grieve roll through him.

_ Cancer. _

Looking over her chart, he saw what the doctors and nurses had said about her recent bout of illness.

_ They think it’s just pneumonia. _

He bit his lip. He knew it wasn’t ethical, he wasn’t a doctor. Sure, he had read a few medical journals over his decades and had tasted blood enough to know when something was wrong, but he couldn’t say _what_ was wrong. He knew he shouldn’t interfere, that they would probably eventually find it. 

_ But this is Rose. I can’t just let them let her die while they wait to figure it out. _

He took out a pen, adding notes to her chart recommending blood tests, an MRI, and to have her visit an oncologist. 

Over the next few of his visits, he saw new notes added to her chart. Some numbers and abbreviations he didn’t understand in the first few, but eventually a diagnosis.

_ Stage I lung cancer. _

He felt a wave of relief. It was still early. She could have more time. He didn’t have to say goodbye yet. Eventually, he went and saw that his sister wasn’t in the room anymore. It was someone else. He was a little older, maybe in his forties, though as Raphael’s long years of youth had passed, figuring out ages had become harder and harder. Raphael glanced over his chart. They hadn’t been able to pinpoint anything yet, just a list of symptoms. 

_ Dizzy spells, shortness of breath, fainting, irregular heart beat. _

Raphael huffed, then looked over to the man. He was pale and his hand was still on his chest over his heart, like it still pained him. Raphael cursed to himself, then took the hand gently enough to not wake him. Like with Rose, he sunk his fang into the stranger’s fingertip just enough to draw blood and get a taste for it.

He went back to the chart and wrote his recommendations.

He wasn’t sure when it became a habit, but soon enough, every few nights he would go into St. Vincent’s to Rose’s old room. Weeks became months became years. Rose had been in her sixties when he had gotten her cancer diagnosis and he had changed her chart, now she was almost ninety. She had been readmitted a few times, and he went to visit her in whatever room she was staying in those times. Still, he would go into that first room she had stayed in all those years ago, examine the notes and diagnoses and make changes to the patients’ charts as necessary. When there was nothing he could do, he would just say a silent prayer for them. He wasn’t really sure why he kept going, but it was almost like an impulse. He knew he needed to. He never met any of the people that came in and out of that room. They were all strangers and they were almost always asleep when he came in during the dead of night. He had nothing to gain from it. Or maybe, when he really thought about it, he already had gained from it.

_ Thirty years. I got thirty more years. _

So he went again and again. And maybe by going back, he could repay those thirty extra years he got.


End file.
